Chantal Akerman

News from Home

News from Home

Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly composed shots of Manhattan circa 1976, the filmmaker reads letters sent by her mother years earlier. The juxtaposition between the intimacy of these domestic reports and the lonely, bleakly beautiful cityscapes results in a poignant reflection on personal and familial disconnection that doubles as a transfixing time capsule.

Film Info

  • France, United States
  • 1976
  • 89 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.37:1
  • French

Available In

Collector's Set

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Chantal Akerman Masterpieces, 1968–1978

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$79.96

News from Home
Cast
Chantal Akerman
Voice
Credits
Director
Chantal Akerman
Cinematography
Babette Mangolte
Cinematography
Jim Asbell
Sound
Dominique Dalmasso
Sound
Larry Haas
Editor
Francine Sandberg

Current

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Eclipse Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
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A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in New York as by her own past…

By Michael Koresky

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Chantal Akerman

Director

Chantal Akerman
Chantal Akerman

One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past quarter century, the film-school dropout Chantal Akerman took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion. Influenced by the structural cinema she was exposed to when she came to New York from her native Belgium in 1970, at age twenty (work by artists like Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Andy Warhol), Akerman made her mark in the decade that followed, playing with long takes and formal repetition in her films, which include the architectural meditation Hotel Monterey (1972), the obsessive portrait of estrangement Je tu il elle (1975), the autobiographical New York elegy News from Home (1976), and the austere antiromance Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978). Her greatest achievement, however, is her epic 1975 experiment Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a hypnotic study of a middle-aged widow’s stifling routine widely considered one of the great feminist films. Such later Akerman films as the Proust adaptation La captive (2000) and the documentary on Mexican-to-U.S. immigration From the Other Side (2002) retain her daring, vital voice.